The Dangerous Few: Taking Seriously Prison Abolition and Its Skeptics
![handle is hein.journals/hlr135 and id is 2033 raw text is: VOLUME 135 JUNE 2022 NUMBER 8
HARVARD LAW REVIEW
© 2022 by The Harvard Law Review Association
ESSAY
THE DANGEROUS FEW:
TAKING SERIOUSLY PRISON
ABOLITION AND ITS SKEPTICS
Thomas Ward Frampton*
Prison abolition, in the span of just afew short years, has established a foothold in elite
criminal legal discourse. But the basic question of how abolitionists would address the
dangerous few often receives superficial treatment; the problem constitutes a spectral
force haunting abolitionist thought ... as soon as abolitionist discourses navigate towards
the programmatic and enter the public arena.' This Essay offers two main contributions:
it (i) maps the diverse ways in which prison abolitionists most frequently respond to the
challenge of the dangerous few, highlighting strengths and infirmities of each stance,
and (2) proposes alternative, hopefully more productive, responses that interrogate and
probe the implicit premises (empirical, ideological, or moral) embedded in and animating
questions concerning the dangerous few.
INTRODUCTION
In the 1970s, with prison populations a fraction of their current size
across much of the planet, prison abolition was more than a possibil-
ity - to many, it seemed inevitable.2 Consider the perspective of one
federal district judge, in a published opinion, in 1972:
*Associate Professor, University of Virginia School of Law.
1 Nicolas Carrier & Justin Pich6, Blind Spots of Abolitionist Thought in Academia: On
Longstanding and Emerging Challenges, CHAMP PENAL/PENAL FIELD, Aug. 10, 2015, para. 6
(quoting Liat Ben-Moshe, The Tension Between Abolition and Reform, in THE END OF PRISONS:
REFLECTIONS FROM THE DECARCERATION MOVEMENT 84, 9o (Mechthild E. Nagel &
Anthony J. Nocella II eds., 2013)).
2 See MICHELLE ALEXANDER, THE NEW JIM CROW 8 (2010) (These days, activists who
advocate 'a world without prisons' are often dismissed as quacks, but only a few decades ago, the
notion that our society would be much better off without prisons - and that the end of prisons was
more or less inevitable - not only dominated mainstream academic discourse in the field of
criminology but also inspired a national campaign by reformers demanding a moratorium
on prison construction.); Joshua Dubler & Vincent Lloyd, Think Prison Abolition in America
Is Impossible? It Once Felt Inevitable, THE GUARDIAN (May 19, 2018, 6:oo AM), https://
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/Jg/prison-abolition-america-impossible-inevitable
[https://perma.cc/FEQ5-5T4R]. This is not to suggest that the abolitionist tradition dates just to
the i97os. See, e.g., Ralph S. Banay, Should Prisons Be Abolished?, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 30,
1955, at SM13; JOHN BARTLOW MARTIN, BREAK DOWN THE WALLS (1954); FRANK
2013](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hlr135&div=98&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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The Dangerous Few: Taking Seriously Prison Abolition and Its Skeptics
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